


The Dusk Carnival

by tsukinobara



Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-24
Updated: 2017-08-24
Packaged: 2018-12-19 13:18:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 670
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11898549
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tsukinobara/pseuds/tsukinobara
Summary: A Carnival of oddities and wonders, the strange and unusual and beautiful.





	The Dusk Carnival

**Author's Note:**

> written for petite_madame and originally posted at [to_pm_with_love](http://to-pm-with-love.livejournal.com/). thanks to dear_tiger for looking it over.

Velvet curtains hanging in tasseled swags, strings and strings of bright, tiny lights, a tinkling piano and a heavy cello: this is the Dusk Carnival, appearing one night without warning and leaving days later, unannounced. A Carnival of oddities and wonders, the strange and unusual and beautiful.

You buy a ticket, drawn by the marvels and the promise of things you have never seen:

The Living Skeleton, tall and cadaverous with every line of every bone inked on his skin. The Girl from Wonderland, with her bright blonde hair and her night-sky skirt, pulling red-eyed rabbits from her pockets and her hat and the empty air. The Human Book, words written in beautiful copperplate script scrolling across her skin, telling her the story you most want to hear. The Boneless, bent backwards so the bottoms of their feet touch their shoulderblades, tumbling across the floor, folding themselves into ever-smaller boxes, like cats. And the Brothers, one tall and broad, the other shorter only in comparison, telling tales and juggling knives and finishing each other's sentences, and sometimes doing not much more than standing there so paying audiences can admire them.

They will show you their tattooed skin, the birds and fish and mythological creatures, the moths with their feathery antennae, the giant roses and climbing ivy and exposed machinery. If you look closely, you might see orange and black koi darting among blades of grass on their upper arms, and you might see rusty gears turning over their ribcages and steam-powered pistons pumping among their leg bones. When the younger one smiles at you, and the older one winks, you will understand it is no trick of the light, no sleight-of-hand, and you have just seen something extraordinary.

For the whole of the Dusk Carnival is out of the ordinary, and this is why you are here, after all, to see things you cannot explain.

But when the Brothers button up their shirts, and roll down their sleeves, you will wonder if you did in fact see what your brain told you was there, if perhaps your eyes were fooling you and merely showing you what you expected to see. Because the Brothers, whatever their demonstrable skills, have the singular talent of making you believe they are nothing special and the most amazing creatures who ever were, both at the same time.

They share few of the physical similarities of full siblings, and if you were to see them under other circumstances, without knowing their names, you might not think them related. But they love each other and look after each other as brothers do, and they are inseparable as conjoined twins, and where one goes, the other always, always follows.

They say the Brothers once had wings, but when the younger one tried to leave, and the older one tried to follow, their wings were cut off as punishment, and to keep them on the ground.

They say the Brothers were once one soul, split by arcane ritual and poured into two bodies, and if they are apart for too long, they will die.

They say if you stroll past their trailer long after the Carnival has closed for the night, when the stars are bright and the moon is high, sometimes you will hear singing, but not in any language you can understand.

(They say that the words written on the Human Book are in this same language, and that her arms and chest and shoulders and back are covered with songs no one has ever heard.)

They say many things, and most of them you will forget. But what you will always remember about the Brothers of the Dusk Carnival is this: the way the younger one smiles at you, and the way the older one smiles at him, and the way they touch each other, and the way they seem to have been made solely one for the other, as if they have been created for that reason alone.

You might even be remembering the truth.


End file.
